earlyriser

Hi all, Happy new Year! Has anybody had any luck getting Canon Pixma printers to work on print servers? In particular the Pro9000 Model? I have 2 of these at school and want to add them to my print server so I can do cost recovery via Papercut. I've been battling away with a TP-Link TL-PS110U print server but I can't get them to play nicely. After a day banging my head against the wall I think I'm going to look for an alternative print server that supports Canon printers (even though the TP-Link says it does, I can't get it to work). The job gets passed to the print server, and the print server says it's passed it to the printer succesfully, but it doesn't print. The lights on the printer blink, then nothing happens. I've come across a 'Pricom 6200-U' which lots of people seem to rave about, but can't seem to buy one anywhere here in NZ. If anyone has had any success, I'd love to know the model of print server you are using Cheers John Driver

Thanks. I have just tried using root hints only and also removing the schoolzone and telecom DNS addresses as forwarders, and using the google dns servers instead. Both things failed for some reason. On both occasions, the machines that are routed out via the schoolzone connection continued to function on the internet, but my admin pc's could not resolve any external addresses. My internal DNS servers were also unable to resolve any external addresses in the DNS console. Now I'm confused.

Hi all. I'm wondering if there is a 'best practice' with regards to DNS Forwarders and Root hints in general? I'll describe my situation and perhaps it'll make it clearer what I'm looking for. We have an AD domain, Server 2008 R2 native. 2 DC's handling DHCP and DNS. On those 2 DNS Servers, I have forwarders setup for our 'schoolzone' ISP's DNS servers, so obviously any DNS queries that are outside of my AD get forwarded to those DNS servers. This all works fine and as expected. Recently however, I have introduced a second DSL router onto the network, to separate the traffic from our 'admin' side of the school from the 'teaching and learning' side of things. I'm using DHCP reservations to dish out IP addresses to my admin PCs, and DHCP option 003 to specify the new DSL router as the router. I have added forwarders for the DSL's ISP to the internal DNS servers also. The result is that although internet access for the admin PCs is working, it is very slow. I think this is due to the fact that the 'SchoolZone' DNS servers are private only to traffic from within the SchoolZone network. i.e from our SchoolZone router. So what happens is: - admin PC requests DNS resolution for an internet address - Internal DNS servers cannot service the request, so they forward the request to the schoolzone DNS servers first - traffic is going out through the normal DSL router, so cannot connect to the schoolzone DNS - Attempts this twice (once for each SchoolZone DNS), fails - Finally gets to the third DNS forwarder in the list which resolves the address and the page loads So my question is should I perhaps remove the forwarders from my DNS servers and rely on root hints only? Or would this be worse? Or should I be configuring things differently? I don't currently have the option to setup VLANs etc. Hope this makes sense. Thanks

Hi Edugeekers. I'm interested to know if anyone out there is using the Lenovo x100e netbook/Notebook? and if so, what do you think of them? We are looking at putting in our first classroom set of laptops, and having evaluated a number of 10.1" models, the feedback from the kids is that they want a bigger screen. The x100e seems to fit the bill, but nobody seems to have an opinion. Any thoughts, or other recommendations? Thanks John

Hey Craig, what is the rough cost of Ruckus and Trapeze gear? i.e Controllers and AP's?

Hi Craig. Maybe talk to Alistair Montgomery at St Hilda's? I can't remember whether they use Ruckus or Trapeze, it's one of them anyway. We use Ubiquiti gear, but it's not controller based (individual AP's) and it works really well, but it certainly isn't pervasive wireless by any means. We will be looking to upgrade to a controller based system next year, to support a classroom laptop program, and will be looking at Ruckus, Trapeze or Xirrus, so maybe you could post on how you get on, whichever you choose? John Driver

Brilliant, couldn't have put it better myself...

Yes. Remember back last year when Douglas Harre was on here, talking about the upgrade? I followed up pretty aggressively after that and after a long wait we were notified at the start of August that we were on the next round. I've spent the last month polishing up our site and infrastructure diagrams and they have now gone off to TorqueIP. Other than waiting for them to come back to me, I've got to arrange an electrical audit of the school as part of the process. The upgrade covers new cabling across the whole school (hopefully including fibre in between blocks, of which we have some old multimode that needs to be replaced). It also covers new electrical fittings, on the premise that wherever there is a network outlet, there will be a double plug socket. I have also heard that AT is the switching gear that they will specify, which is a shame as I really wanted to move to ProCurve so I could add it to my HP Management setup. We've got AT switches at the moment but they are all unmanaged. I'm not sure how much choice we will have, if any. I'll keep updates on here about how it all goes. It's a huge job, we are an urban school, in a historic building. I'm glad I'm not doing it

If it isn't outdoor rated cable, it is likely to be moisture ingress through the jacket or general degradation of the copper. Any cabling that goes outside either needs to be outdoor rated, or encased in something. I have had exactly the same experience at a rural school here in NZ, continuity tested OK with the cable tester, but no go for connectivity. Unfortunately, the only fix was to replace the cable......

Thanks for your reply SYNACK I've tried this on the DC's (2008 R2) but when I try to add 122.56.252.129 or 210.55.111.1 as forwarders, the DC's can't resolve those addresses They were only using SchoolZone webmail, but have moved them onto our Google Apps Gmail, nothing else from SchoolZone so should be OK. Possibly looking at completely moving away from SchoolZone next year I have thought about this, but I'm fairly confident that we are locked down enough to avoid it. For the moment anyway.... We've got a flat network at the moment, but once we get new switching gear from the SNUP3 upgrade, I'll be VLanning like mad I checked that too, and I spoke to Tim Harper at SchoolZone and there was no problem from their end

Hi all. Back to basics network advice required here. Like most schools here in NZ we have seen a huge uptake in internet usage over the last year. We currently have a single 2mb Telecom SchoolZone connection for our internet access and web filtering, and over the last few months have experienced some pretty severe bottlenecks. Senior management are concerned that when the internet connection is saturated because of use in the classroom, it is affecting the 'business' side of the school, and they have asked me for an interim solution until we move to a fibre connection (hopefully at some point towards the end of next year...) My thought is to purchase a standard business DSL package (which will obviously come with a router), stick that on the network, and use DHCP Reservations and the 'Router' option to point the office/administration PCs to that router for internet. I'm confused about DNS however. My DC, which is issuing DHCP addresses to my workstations has it's gateway set to our SchoolZOne router and all existing internet traffic goes through this. How do I configure DNS on the DC and workstations to still use the DC for it's primary DNS, then forward to the new router for unresolved queries. Does that make sense?

Link here to a post about the new HP6550B, which uses a different docking station connector than all of the previous HP Laptops

Anyone going to TechEd 2010 in Auckland? Fancy a meet up? tweet #revirdnhoj

Thought I'd post this for any of you running Lego MindStorms NXT on your network. An issue that has cropped up for us has been the save location of the 'MyBlocks' components. Although MindStorms allows you to save the project files wherever you like (our students put them in their home drives), the 'MyBlocks' components don't provide a traditional save as dialog box. After a bit of digging we worked out that they are saved to "C:\documents and settings\%username%\My Documents\Lego Creations\Mindstorms Projects\Profiles\Default\Blocks" which for us (and I'm sure most networks) is a problem. Students have no access to C: and the profiles are deleted on logoff, so our students would work on a PC, create and save a project, then add some MyBlocks. On logging on to another machine, the project would open, but the MyBlocks would be missing. To get around this we did the following: - grabbed a copy of the 'settings.ini' file from "C:\documents and settings\%username%\My Documents\Lego Creations\Mindstorms Projects\Profiles\Default\ - edited this file and changed the "Data Directory=/C/...." to "Data Directory=/H/" - copied this up to a public share - created a script that xcopies this file to "C:\documents and settings\%username%\My Documents\Lego Creations\Mindstorms Projects\Profiles\Default\" then starts the Mindstorms program - Edited the desktop shortcut on the student machines to run this script instead of running Mindstorms directly So the student runs the shortcut, xcopy copies the ini file, then Mindstorms runs (hardly any delay really). When they save a MyBlock now, it goes into their Home drive so it now becomes portable across the network If anyone knows an alterantive or better way, please comment Batch Script Attached legomindstorms2.zip

Thought it might be good for us to share some of our blogs/wiki sites that I'm sure many of us run. Here is mine: I know about computers it's basic, and early days, but a good place for me to vent....

Man this took me a while to get back to... yes, it was me that left that message but I didn't follow up. I think my people have been talking to your people anyway re. the Dunedin Rise ICT PD Cluster. I've met Jeff from JMC and Carla from St Hilda's but yet to meet the real ICT people! I want to try an setup some sort of group of us IT Managers/technicians in Dunedin schools to get together and talk about what we do. Interested?

Just a quick update on the RM1 computers that we bought from Insite last year (approx 8 months ago) All going really well so far. I have very little to do with them other than scheduled reimaging, which is always a sign that they are working well. Anti-Graffiti paint seems to work well and the all in one design means the students can't fiddle with any of the cabling etc. at the back of the box. Standard Microsoft Keyboards and Mice, which are OK, and because the students can't unplug them they aren't being moved from PC to PC and damaged as has happened before. I was concerned about power supplies as we have been stung in the past with ex-lease machines and faulty power supplies that are impossible to replace, but so far the PSU's have been fine. I suppose we'll have to wait a few more years for them to start failing.... Insite themselves were good to deal with and for the price (probably $100 more per machine than say an equivalent HP model) they are well worth it. I see there are some available on TradeMe at the moment. Pentium 4s so not as new as ours but probably a good buy for a smaller school.

I wonder if this is a case of a company/product growing too big too fast? I have used and recommended NOD32 for years as an antivirus product on desktops and unthinkingly didn't hesitate to stick it on our new servers (and others). In the back of my mind I've always been a bit concerned though that there was very little information from ESET regarding configuration on servers. I remember ringing them a few years ago and getting a fairly generic "it's the same on servers as it is on workstations" response and at the time thinking that they really didn't have a clue. I rang them earlier in the year about installing on a Server Core installation and they were like "what's that then?...." At least they have some basic recommendations now, and combined with the Microsoft generic antivirus exclusions some of us seem to be able to achieve something workable, but an enterprise class product should be better than this. Come on ESET, employ someone to test your products properly on servers and save us some pain. Since back revving to version 3.0.657 on all of our 2008 R2 and 2008 servers and configuring the exclusions etc. our issues seem to have settled. However, I didn't follow the recommendations exactly. At the moment I have the whole sysvol and NTDS directories excluded as I was convinced this was the problem. Not great for security but at least we can all log on now........

Hi there. Which version of NOD32 (2, 3 or V4), and what OS? I have just completed a migration of our directory to Windows Server 2008/R2, and everything was fine, other than every so often, a few of the servers would just die. No events in the logs, could still ping the servers, but file shares were unresponsive and clicking anything on the desktop of the server brought the whole thing to a halt. These are brand new, HP Proliant DL380s with 32Gb RAM and Quad CPUs. I spent ages with performance monitoring and troubleshooting, switches etc. and eventually the light came on in my pea sized brain and I looked at the antivirus software. I've used NOD32 for years and had installed the latest version of NOD32 (v4, x64) without even thinking about compatibility. Searches in the Wilders Security Forums soon revealed many with exact or very similar issues. To cut a long story short, I uninstalled NOD32 V4, downloaded and installed V3 and configured as per Eset's recommendations, and the problems went away instantly. Phew...

If you work this out Synack, let me know! Am just deploying Musac via RemoteApp to hopefully avoid the usual issues of teachers running it over wireless and corrupt database etc. Would be nice if I could give them something completely seemless

See here for a press release on 14 schools that are getting network upgrades partially funded by the MOE If anyone can give me some clear advice on how a school applies for the next round of funding (as mentioned in the article to be announced early next year), please let me know. I have spent the last 3 months phoning and emailing Douglas Harre and the Ministry to be told that they are too busy to talk to us. Is there some mysterious group that we have to be a member of or a secret handshake that I just don't know?....

Update on this thread. As per the Datacom page shown below, the deal between Microsoft and the Ministry of Education has now been officially renewed. I think most schools should have received the re-enrollment forms already, but if you haven't, get in touch with Datacom at [email protected] or phone on 0800 225 542. Interface Magazine Article Datacom/ From what I can tell, other than a few changes in the actual software that is being licenced (i.e No Encarta any more), the main difference is that for any Non-Core products (which you pay for), you now have to pay for the whole three years at the start of the agreement, rather than the yearly increments with the previous agreement. Any other thoughts./input appreciated

Excellent Blog Steve. I have been thinking of doing the same thing but I might just read yours instead I laughed out loud when I read the part about you holding back from helping the hapless laptop user in Samoa, it happens all the time doesn't it? Last night a real "know it all" friend of a friend starting going on about how his laptop webcam wasn't working and he needed to do a virus scan to fix it, and if that didn't work he was going to fix his "register" and maybe even install Server 2008 as his OS instead, because (didn't I know....) it was much better than Windows XP... I was tempted to either offer to fix his laptop, or to drive over it with my landrover, but I just turned, walked away and grinned to myself....

These steps are pretty much what we have just done, from 2000 to 2008 R2, and it went OK. What caught us out was having WINS on our old PDC, and when we turned the old PDC off, a few things went wrong (some legacy stuff on the network that needs WINS obviously - will be working hard to iron that out...) We fixed this temporarily by putting WINS on the new 2008 R2 box and migrating the database across. We also had a strange DNS issue with alias (CName) records to certain servers as well, where you could ping the servers and map a drive to the real server name, but not to the alias name. Only some servers were affected. I'm thinking WINS again but we worked around it. The other things I'd add to this list is to watch where your logon scripts are being run from (if they are in the default AD location that is fine as they are replicated, but if they are running from a share on your old DC, obviously they will stop working!) and just to do a really good analysis of your old server(s), looking for those little gotchas that someone else might have setup years ago, before you turn them off. We had lots of disconnecting the network cable of the old server and then plugging it back in again when little things stopped working. No disruption to the network really, other than the DNS issues etc.

Running 2008 R2 on a new DC and a few other servers, all going well so far but.... I upgraded my Windows Deployment Services server to R2 and at the time, remember reading something about it breaking Sysprep's ability to join XP machines to the domain , and lo and behold, Sysprep can no longer join an XP machine to the domain after being imaged using WDS! Haven't looked into it yet, but I suppose it's my own fault for not doing my research beforehand and leaping into R2. Only other issue I have, which may or may not be R2 related is that in demoting our old 2000 DC to member server, and promoting the new 2008 R2 to be a DC (FSMO/DNS/DHCP etc.), something has become broken with my DNS Alias (CName) records in that I cannot browse to them anymore. I can ping them, and I can browse/map drives to the server shares themselves, but if I try to browse or map a drive to an alias, it fails. Oh, and there is something about changes to authentication in R2 which has broken the ability to backup using Windows Server Backup directly to a NAS with ext2 drives. Other than that, all good.......